Chrome: Keeping it Simple, Stupid

So after killing my runaway IE processes for the nth time yesterday I decided to download Google Chrome. I was extremely sceptical of their ‘faster browsing’ claim, believing it would amount to illusions similar to their tricks in Gmail – actioning requests onmousedown, etc.

I was wrong.

24 hours into my first Chrome session it still only uses up 50meg of memory – and stayed at ~20 yesterday for most of the day. It refused to choke in an IE-like manner over sites like Ebay, YouTube & Gmail. Flash videos loaded up closer to my PS3 browsers speed (i.e. like something approaching acceptable performance), and as I say, no memory leak. Internet Explorer would have hogged anything up to 600meg of space by now, thus requiring me to save all my current tabs on notepad/to memory kill it then start the shoddy thing up again.

Granted Gmail and other javascript-heavy sites did not seem to run any faster. But they didn’t stall either. It doesn’t come with Java support built in, but I don’t think I’ll risk adding it on – Chrome is my new speedy browsing experience from now on. Firefox still gets the heavy-lifting vote due to the overwhelming array of plugins I’ve slapped onto it.I’ve been critical in the past towards Google and their useless feature-bloat, particularly in Gmail’s case. But with Chrome they seem to have done good.

Update: Too much hope I guess. No sooner had I posted this than I found a bug. Over and above the annoying textbox glitch that seems to be posing quite a problem. It’s treatment of textbox input is faulty when it sends to the server – It removes newline formatting in WordPress 2.2.1. Thus my blog post came out as one long blurb. Bug report submitted.